Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic:<\/p>\n
\nHow many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six.<\/p>\n
I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only six different professors. Five-and-a-half, really, because one of those was half of a team-taught course. I had three-and-a-half classes with one professor, and two others for two classes each.<\/p>\n
Of course, that’s not a hard lower bound. Some have even suggested that the number could be as low as one (Garfield, ca. 1870, though it’s not clear how much Mark Hopkins<\/a> knew about physics). Other small-college folks may be able to claim smaller numbers.<\/p>\n
Of course, that’s a slightly flippant answer to a question that really boils down to “How many different areas of physics do students need to learn from experts in that area?”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That’s a little harder to answer, because it’s not clear that, for example, first-semester classical mechanics really needs to be taught by an expert in classical mechanics. Likewise introductory E&M and sophomore level modern physics. So there could be a lot of “doubling up” in the teaching of the curriculum.<\/p>\n
I would say that a good, solid undergraduate degree in physics should see students learning the following topics well:<\/p>\n
\n
- Electricity and Magnetism at the level of Griffiths’s book<\/li>\n
- Quantum Mechanics also at the level of Griffiths’s book (Townsend would be a bonus)<\/li>\n
- Classical Mechanics at the level of… I used Baierlein, which is out of print. I think we use Fowles at Union<\/li>\n
- One good course in Thermo\/ StatMech… Kittel was the book we used<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
(Special Relativity is also worth seeing, but doesn’t require a full semester– you can mix it in with classical mechanics and E&M and sophomore-level QM.)<\/p>\n
The first three of those probably require two semester-length courses each, so that’s seven semesters worth of teaching, but probably really only requires three faculty (I wouldn’t do both semesters of the two-course subjects with the same person). A typical academic major requires more like 10-12 courses, which leaves three courses for “Special Topics” like Condensed Matter\/ Solid State Physics, Quantum Optics, Nuclear and Particle Physics, Relativity\/ Cosmology, Classical Optics, Electronics, and so on. That leaves two more for undergraduate research, which I would regard as essential preparation.<\/p>\n
The research is probably the limiting step, because anybody who can teach special topics can probably also teach one or more of the required core. You’re probably looking at about three faculty minimum if you just worry about course work, but depending on how many students you have in the department, you probably need more than that to handle research advising.<\/p>\n
That’s a half-assed guess at an answer, anyway. It’s not my ideal arrangement of classes, mind, but if you stripped things down to the lowest possible level, that’s what you’d get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic: How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree? I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six. I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only… Continue reading How Many Physics Professors Does It Take?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7],"tags":[123,92,88],"class_list":["post-4978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","tag-education-2","tag-physics-2","tag-science-2","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}